Artist Statement:

I’m an American artist curious about the intersection of nature, culture, and place. My work draws inspiration from organic forms, locating abstract figures within animated landscapes that mingle the real and the imagined. I principally in a variety of media, including oil on canvas, gouache, mixed media, and digital painting. My work layers washes of color with solid gestures to hide and reveal relationships between elements and reflect the rich complexity of the natural world. The effect is not naturalistic but rather expresses nature, breathes it in and out. There’s a sense of the past mirrored in the present, and I use erasure and overlay to create a feeling of palimpsest. There’s also always something in the work that feels awkward or suspended, waiting to emerge, not yet at home.

All of these media are complementary both in practice and effect. Paper’s shallow working depth invites — or rather, demands — a spontaneity of purpose, a fluency and immediacy. Digital media is inexhaustibly malleable, so the critical decision is when to stop, when the image has had enough. Oil media falls somewhere between these two extremes. My images are often vivid explorations of tension and conflict, of flow and release, of revelation and obscurity. I also keep an active life drawing practice to ground my visual efforts in rigorous seeing and draftsmanship.

Although my undergraduate education focused on studio art and art history, I later received a Master’s degree in creative writing and am now active as a literary nonfiction writer and food journalist. This work has allowed me to travel extensively to explore our personal and cultural ties to nature and agriculture and how they affect our sense of self, family, and geography. These discoveries find their way into all of my work via explorations of situatedness and juxtaposition, of discovering oneself within a context and deciding whether to stay or go.

A note about all of the works in this online gallery: These are all digital-originals, which can be printed with archival inks on rag paper at scales ranging from intimate to grand. Since the printing is done on-demand, the collector can stipulate a preferences of size and substrate. Prices vary accordingly.